The Swedish entrepreneur has swapped all his regular Bitcoin for the new branch of the currency called bitcoin cash

Emil added: "We pay all our 60 employees in bitcoins. All my salary over the last three years has been in bitcoin.”

Bitcoin has skyrocketed in value by more than 1900 per cent this year to nearly £15,000, but the massive influx of users has put strain on the network.

The algorithms can only process a limited number of transactions per second.

Users who volunteer higher fees to the “miners” — the computers which continually work together to verify and add to the blockchain — have a greater likelihood of having their transaction processed in the next “block”.

As a result, the average cost to complete a transaction has also shot up in recent weeks, from around $US6 to $US26.

The Swede continued: “It costs a lot to transfer bitcoins to and from the stock exchanges.

“When I sold my bitcoin I had to pay $US50 and wait 12 hours for the transaction to go through because of this. It’s completely unreasonable.”

The bitcoin community has been bitterly split on the issue of technology upgrades which would potentially speed up the network.

The value of Bitcoin has rocketed up in recent years with more and more people trying to cash in on the digital cash

That divide led to the creation in August this year of bitcoin cash, which Mr Oldenburg and his business partner, Bitcoin.com chief executive Roger Ver, have been aggressively promoting.

Emil said: “It’s a group of fanatic bitcoin Talibans who themselves do not use bitcoin everyday [who] want it like this.

“They see bitcoin like digital gold and a technical experiment, not something you should actually use.

"It will never be a currency used in everyday life or for people who run companies.

“We have actually stopped developing new services for the old bitcoin network now and focus mostly on bitcoin cash.

"There it only costs 10 öre ($0.02) to send and no waiting times. The only [downside] is that bigger hard drives are required, but it’s not a problem for most.”

Mr Oldenburg said despite the massive influx of investors pushing up the price of bitcoin, the vast majority had not experienced the low user-friendliness, high fees and long wait times — because most had only bought bitcoin, but never sold or traded the currency.